The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.

In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

Christmas began in the heart of God. It is complete only when it reaches the heart of man.Why wait for a call when you have a command?

The point of a library's existence is not persuasion or evangelism, but knowledge. It is irrelevant to the good library whether, as an institution, it shares or promotes your core values or mine, or the Attorney General's or Saddam Hussein's. The library is always an instrument of choice, and the choice is always yours, not your elected or designated leaders.

Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.

There's no geist like the Zeitgeist.

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.